This is because, if a health care facility has $1 million to spend, its managers are more likely to spend it on an expensive piece of lab equipment than on information technology, D’Avolio says, adding that the investment on lab equipment can be made up by charging patients access to it as a billable service. This is not the case for IT. Also, computers and networks used throughout hospitals and health care facilities are disconnected and often manufactured by different vendors without a standardized way of communicating. "Medical data is difficult to standardize because caring for patients is a complex process," he says. "We need to find some way of reaching across not just departments but entire hospitals. If you can’t measure something, you can’t improve it, and without access to this data, you can’t measure it."

　　To qualify for a piece of the $19 billion being offered through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), healthcare facilities will have to justify the significance of their IT investments to ensure they are "meaningful users" of EHRs. The Department of Health and Human Services has yet to define what it considers meaningful use

　　Aggregating info to create knowledge

　　Ideally, in addition to providing doctors with basic information about their patients, databases of vital signs, images, laboratory values, medications, diseases, interventions, and patient demographic information could be mined for new knowledge, D’Avolio says. "With just a few of these databases networked together, the power to improve health care increases exponentially," D’Avolio suggested. "All that is missing is the collective realization that better health care requires access to better information—not automation of the status quo." Down the road, the addition of genomic information, environmental factors and family history to these databases will enable clinicians to begin to realize the potential of personalized medicine, he added.

　　1. In America, it is slow to adopt information technology because .

　　A) the funds invested by the government is not enough in the past

　　B) EHRs have received less attention of the public in the past

　　C) whether it will be useful to doctors or not is doubtful

　　D) UPMC knows how difficult it is to digitize the hospital

　　2. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) .

　　A) is the first medical center to adopt information technology

　　B) satisfy the requirement of the government on information technology

　　C) spent less money on information technology than it was estimated

　　D) attempted to created a universal EHR system, but met some difficulties

　　3. The health care network’s IT systems require a lot of effort to ensure it can communicate with one another mainly because .

　　A) the integration among different system is largely up to the IT staff

　　B) UPMC is like many other health care organizations in the United States

　　C) UPMC makes EHR systems look easy